Hell Is Round the Corner

by Tricky

  That was not my plan, and everything I’d prepared for went out of the window. Maybe it would have been different if it had been my third album that I’d gained success with, but because it was my first album, it just went fucking nuts.

  One time during those crazy days in February/March ’95, I was in a minicab going to Heathrow and there was a motorbike stopped beside my window at the traffic lights. There was a massive billboard poster of me beside the road, and the biker looked at the poster, looked at me, did a double take at the poster again, looked back at me, and then we sped off. Life suddenly was as weird as fuck.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ANONYMITY

  Losing your anonymity is the worst thing that can ever happen to you. This is what some people don’t realise about being a musician: these days especially, they want to be famous and have the whole celebrity thing happen to them. Believe me, you don’t want it.

  For example: you know that first part of the day where you’re just meditating? You go out for some air, sit down somewhere and you’re just having a coffee, then someone will come over to you and say, ‘Oh, are you Tricky?’ They walk into your world, and take over your energy, and it’s really not healthy for you.

  If you’re walking down the street, and two people walk past, and you hear them whispering, ‘Look, it’s Tricky!’ that will change the way you walk, the way you feel, the way you think, for the rest of that day. You are in your own world, and that suddenly brings you out. It totally changes you, that day, and for always.

  You start to think, ‘Why do most people want to know me now I’ve got to a certain level of recognition?’ It’s because you’re in the limelight, and people are attracted to that. It’s like when they talk about vampires in old Jamaican records. They don’t mean literal vampires; they mean people who suck your energy. And that’s why people want to know you, because they want to suck your energy – it makes them feel good about themselves, because they ‘know’ someone famous. Pretty dark, right?

  So, losing your anonymity is the worst thing, and I think my music shows that as well: I’m not trying to be the loudest voice. I see a lot of young people now who seem to think celebrity is the best part of the music. No, that’s the price you have to pay for your success. That’s the problem part. The perfect thing would be to do your music, and then disappear, but we’ve got into a pattern since the 1990s where celebrity is part of the job. And the part people dream of.

  I fucking hated it. My first album went to No.3 in the charts, and my time was taken after that. My time wasn’t my time anymore. I never even had a chance to do music, almost – to have the space to do it on my terms. That was it, I was kind of a celeb, and it was not comfortable for me. I could be in a queue somewhere, then someone would recognise me and I’d see them go whisper-whisper to their friend or whoever, then they’re both looking … I’d have to say to people sometimes, ‘What are you looking at?’ It’s just not a good vibe.

  People said I looked unhappy, and that’s because I wasn’t into that side of things. I didn’t see myself as a pop artist, a chart-topping guy. Some people want to get to the top of the charts. I didn’t think like that. I just wanted to make the best music, I wanted to change music. Getting in the charts wasn’t my thing. I was thinking of myself as an underground artist, then all of a sudden – what the fuck? I thought I would be underground, making my music, and the next thing I know, I’ve got Elton John talking about me on morning TV. I didn’t envisage my career being like that. I thought I would be more like a blues artist – semi-known, but not really.

  I was being written about as part of ‘the Bristol scene’, which made no sense to me. There was a lot of music being made in Bristol, but everybody kept to their own little corner. People saw each other in clubs, because it’s a small city, but there weren’t no scene. It ain’t like Manchester, where you had all these different rock bands doing their thing – the Stone Roses are hanging out with the Happy Mondays, but the Stone Roses are one thing, and Happy Mondays are another. Portishead made music like they did because of Massive Attack. Geoff Barrow would never have been doing music like their Dummy album if he hadn’t met us guys. He didn’t come through hip-hop like we did. Some people even thought that Portishead came before me. How can that ever happen? Come on! I’m a hip-hop head!

  People fell for this ‘Bristol scene’ shit. Here’s another thing: Portishead are not even from Bristol. They’re from Portishead. And when people started talking about the ‘Bristol Sound’, what they didn’t realise was, I had recorded some stuff there, like my stuff on Blue Lines, but Maxinquaye was made in Harlesden. It came from being isolated up there, not knowing anyone.

  Even when I was at No.3 in the charts I was by myself almost all the time. With my success, I was able to move from Harlesden into a little flat just off Kensington High Street. I didn’t know anybody there either, but it was really convenient: there was food around there, and shops, and cafés. I lived in areas like that, just off the high street, so I could go and get a coffee somewhere and watch people walking around. In that way, living somewhere like Kensington, you are with people. For someone who spends their time by themself, you ain’t gonna get so lonely.

  I never really got friends as such. I don’t know, I’m not very good at making firm friends. Well, it’s not that I’m not very good, but I’d rather be by myself, to be honest. I can’t imagine living with anybody. It wouldn’t matter how big the house was, I just prefer to be by myself.

  After that nightmare American tour with Massive Attack, I had already decided that, when I did my album, I wasn’t going to do any live shows. I was never going to tour again. I was used to the sound-system way of doing things, but I felt like that was over – standing onstage with turntables just didn’t work for me.

  When my manager, Debbie Swainson, asked about live work, I said, ‘No, I’m not going out with turntables and a microphone, because I did that with Massive Attack, and it was fucking awful. You’re standing onstage next to the turntables, with all that space around you and everyone staring up, trying to recreate songs from the album, and the DJ is actually just playing the album. There’s no way I’m going out with me and Martina and someone on turntables. It’s too boring. So, no, let’s not do touring, I’ll just do interviews and that.’

  ‘Why don’t you get a band?’ says Debbie.

  ‘What live band could ever play my music?’ I replied, thinking of all the grief I’d had explaining my ideas to people who thought like conventional musicians.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ shrugged Debbie, ‘just let me put a band together and we’ll see if we can make it work.’

  It was Debbie that got me wondering if maybe we could do it live. Thinking about it, I have no idea how I ended up with Debbie as my manager. Everything was done for me. I did that album with Island, I had a manager, I had an accountant, I had a lawyer. It was all sorted for me, and fuck knows who did it – maybe Chris Blackwell.

  Debbie made some calls about fixing me up with a band. She spoke to a guy called Pete Briquette – he used to play bass in the Boomtown Rats – and Pete got some people together. They worked together for two weeks at a rehearsal studio, then I went down there to see how they were getting on. They played ‘Overcome’, and I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t understand: how the fuck were they doing that live? I was a studio artist, I wasn’t a live artist at that stage, and I didn’t actually know you could make my music come to life like that.

  One thing I’d said to Debbie from the start was I didn’t want a trendy band where everybody looked really good. I didn’t want that image. I just wanted old men. Old chubby dudes! I wasn’t into that thing of everybody looking cool. I didn’t want to go and do TV shows where everybody has got the right haircut, and the right clothes on – so obviously it was more about the music, and what they could play, but just visually as well – I didn’t want that hipster vibe.

  True to that request, the band were all way older than me, and I had them a long ti
me before Massive Attack, Portishead or any of those electronic bands had live bands. I was the first to have a live band out of all those people, and that’s not me tooting my own horn – that’s because of Debbie Swainson.

  I can’t remember any particular gigs from that year, because you don’t remember them as mind-blowing yourself. I don’t really think like that, remembering gigs. You just get through them. A good show is a good show, but once a few days and weeks go by, you forget about it – you’re doing a new show, and then another new show. And someone has to organise it all, which I couldn’t do, so I started working with Ben Winchester, and he’s still my booking agent to this day.

  BEN WINCHESTER: I’d approached Debbie Swainson on other business and ended up landing an account with Tricky. His live trajectory was unusual because he didn’t start out by playing the club circuit – his first live shows were after Maxinquaye had been released. The album came out in February ’95, and in March he went out on the road supporting PJ Harvey. Normally people will have hit that milestone long before their album materialises.

  His first headline show was at the Clapham Grand, London, in May 1995. It was an unusual entry into live performing, but there were obvious positives: he was going in at a level where there was proper production, a proper PA, a light show. From the start, it was a very unusual show, and quite theatrical. Pete Briquette had put together a band of older session musicians, if I can put that politely, and they all stood onstage wearing dinner jackets, while Tricky was in the middle wearing a dress, with Martina at his side.

  Playing with Polly was amazing because she had a fantastic show as well – maybe he’d seen her and thought, ‘Okay, I need to do something here.’ I’d heard him discussing how to present his album, with all of the atmosphere and the musical themes, and how that would translate visually.

  I know that Tricky sometimes wore a dress and make-up. My feeling was that he had watched David Byrne in the Talking Heads videos. He was trying to make his performance into a slightly discordant spectacle. And you obviously had Martina, who was amazing, so he wasn’t on his own out front.

  The lighting was put together by Angus McPhail, The Cure’s old lighting designer, who claims to have invented black as a colour. He was the guy that turned all the lights down when Tricky was playing – not in pitch darkness, as happened later on, but it still had a distinct atmosphere.

  The shows got darker and louder and more intense as time went on, as he learnt what worked, and what worked for him. I don’t think he knew at the beginning; he just did what people asked, or what he thought they expected. Later on, he thought he’d be better off doing his own thing.

  PETE BRIQUETTE: When Tricky’s record was taking off – or at that early stage after a couple of white labels, when it looked like it was taking off – it was decided to form a band around him, and I got the call from Debbie Swainson to do that. Even though he had done gigs with Massive Attack, he didn’t know anything about being in a band as such, and obviously I’d been around the block before in the Boomtown Rats.

  I was very fond of Tricky. We were both misfits. He was a working-class black guy from Bristol, and I was a very middle-class Irishman from Dublin, so there was no great connection on that level, but I just liked the guy from day one. Also: that record was great. I helped remix one or two tracks, and I played bass on one, ‘Suffocated Love’. I was so excited – you know, for someone like me to work in that completely cutting-edge style of music!

  I enjoyed my time with him. He is a very interesting guy – I’m always attracted to odd, interesting men – rather than someone like Tony Hadley, you know what I’m saying.

  Tricky had said to me, ‘I want a band of really old guys, in their seventies, if possible.’ These guys weren’t quite that old – the drummer was a lovely old East End jazzer called Les Serpa, and he was in his sixties. So was the guitarist, this oddball Frenchman, Patrice Chevalier. The piano player was a bit younger. The initial keyboard guy came from the Beautiful South, but he was a really good keyboard/sampling guy, so me and him programmed up all the samples together, but he quickly left because the gig just didn’t suit him.

  Les was the first drummer I’d come up against who had a tiny kit. Little bass drum, little snare, little everything, so he played like a jazz player and he got a beautiful sound out of it. Up to that point I’d only had rock drummers, with big showy kits like Roger Taylor in Queen, whereas Les’s little kit really sang.

  On the sampling side, it wasn’t a question of pressing one button and all the samples would go off at the right time. They would all be triggered live, manually, and if the samples went a bit haywire, we had a good drummer who would go with it. There was a certain amount of leeway for interpretation and improvisation. We would gradually extend the tracks a little bit, to give them life, but then Tricky would randomly change things live onstage. It was nerve-wracking, but we would just about get away with it. A loop would be going, and he would go, ‘Yeah, play more!’

  ‘Er, ooooo-kaaaay,’ and the guitar player would keep going, and he would keep rapping. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it was a mess. But because it was Tricky, and it was all dark with hardly any lights and you couldn’t see anything anyway, it sounded right – a bit dangerous and on the edge.

  Maxinquaye was really blowing people’s minds, and Tricky was absolutely the hippest, coolest kid on the block. People were ringing me up looking for guest passes – people I hadn’t heard from in years, so I was living in his reflected glory, where I became hip and cool for two minutes. Which was fine by me!

  At Shepherd’s Bush Empire, the guest list was stuffed. David Bowie went to that gig, and a whole lot of the current supermodels of the day. Bob Geldof was there, and it was right in the middle of the whole scandal about Bob’s wife, Paula Yates, two-timing with Michael Hutchence. Our accountant went along as well, and he too soon realised Hutchence was there, so he had to manoeuvre things to make sure that Geldof and Hutchence were in different parts of the building at all times!

  At one point in the evening, I called the lift backstage and, when the door opened, there was Geldof, Bowie, Bowie’s wife Iman, Jerry Hall, and two or three supermodels. Like, hello! At that time, there was no doubt that Tricky’s was the gig to go to. Everybody was jumping over each other to be in the same room as him. I remember looking at all these people, and it was like a dream, you were trying to take it all in. It was overload. I can’t even remember the actual gig itself.

  We did The Word, that awful late-night TV show on Channel 4. Backstage, Tricky and Martina put on the wedding gear from the Maxinquaye sleeve, and it looked fucking great. He came to me and said, ‘What do you think – should we wear this?’ I said, ‘Yeah, absolutely!’ When it came to it, they didn’t wear it, and he might have been right. He is very dangerous, but he is also very careful. He has a keen eye for doing things right, and he probably thought it might have come across as cheap and gimmicky in that setting.

  Onstage, there was always a certain irritated tension between him and Martina, which was intriguing to people, and was part of the atmosphere of the music. It wasn’t traditional show business, like Tom Jones and Cilla Black. It was a darker musical connection between them, very much bound up with their personal lives, so the two of them seemed very interlocked up there, through the music and their personal agenda together.

  I think once Tricky discovered being in a band, and going on the road, he loved it. But there was no madness on the road. He didn’t do a lot of the partying. When it came to women, he was quite shy – not the most confident of guys. Often, he wasn’t aware that women were actually falling at his feet, so in that sense he wasn’t a natural rocker. He wasn’t in it to swig from a bottle of Jack Daniels and throw a TV out of the window. But he wanted to do something.

  TRICKY: It was dark onstage because I was scared. When I first tried it, I was shaking going up there. That night, there were hardly any lights on, and I got called a genius because of it. There were articles say
ing, ‘Genius show!’ ‘He doesn’t compromise!’ No, I was just fucking shitting myself!

  At first, having no lights was fear, pure and simple, but as we went on, touring with PJ Harvey, I very quickly realised that I just couldn’t do the bright lights stuff, and no lights was the comfortable way to do it for me, so I never changed it.

  Have you ever watched a band, and they put the lights on the crowd? What happens is, they freeze. When you light up the crowd, at that moment they could be getting into it, having a good time, feeling relaxed, then all of a sudden the lighting guy puts the lights on them, and it kills everything. It’s the same if you’re up onstage: it takes all the vibe away. A lighting guy will put a bright light on me, and I just don’t want to do anything.

  When you’re onstage, it’s like a meditation. You’re meditating, or it’s like when you’re having a massage, and you’re really mellow, and then someone opens the curtains and there’s sunlight coming in on you. It takes you out of your moment.

  That meditation begins in the dressing room before the show. A lot of times, I’ll piss in a bin in there, because to go to the bathroom you might have to go through other people or other bands, and I don’t want to see people and have conversations and break from the meditation.

  It’s even hard walking to the stage sometimes because you’ve got people hanging out and people who are working and you’re going straight out of real life and you know that people are just looking at you.

  By the time Bowie came to that big show at Shepherd’s Bush, I had been performing Maxinquaye for a while, and it wasn’t just dim lighting – you couldn’t see fuck all, it was pitch-black!

  Afterwards he came and met me, and he seemed quite a shy guy. When we first came face to face, we kind of stared at each other, then he offered me a cigarette and we smiled at each other, then we hung out. Kylie Minogue was there and Naomi Campbell and that actress Nicole Kidman. She didn’t say a lot, she just stood there. You’ve just come offstage, and those situations are weird.